Green Days

Hana MAKHMALBAF

Iran

2009

73min

HD

color

드라마

Venice International Film Festival 2009 Toronto International Film Festival 2009

Synopsis Ava, an Iranian girl suffering from depression, blames recent political events in Iran for her troubled mental state and goes to a psychologist. The psychologist advises her to take on physical work, and later, to work on a play. However, the play, inspired by the reality and problems of her society, is banned. It is election time. The city is alive with possibilities. A new wave of hope has sent people massing into the street to participate, to vote against the current president. Everywhere there is singing, dancing, action - a vibrant, passionate vision of a very different future for her country. But Ava still doesn’t believe change will come.

Program NoteGreen Days is a courageous and sincere film of Hana Makhmalbaf, the youngest daughter of the Makhmalbaf family. A young lady Ava is suffering from depression due to the political situation in Iran. She receives psychotherapy and tries physical labor such as cleaning or stage acting as the doctor says. But her play is soon banned for political reasons. Ava feels hopeless in the political environment in Iran where women are deprived of freedom of speech and chances to show their talents. But after she talks to the liberal Mousavi supporters on the street encouraging votes, she regains hope. But this film does not end with hope. It goes further in demonstrating how the hope of the Iranian people was trampled on by the conservative party: it continuously shows the YouTube piece picturing the citizens violently attacked by police in the anti-government protest and the college student Neda Agha Soltan killed in the protest. This film is a hybrid of stage rehearsal scenes, fake documentary sequences, and real YouTube pieces. But inside of it lies a political goal for sure. By representing Ava as the persona, director Hana Makhmalbaf expresses her hope that the Iranian people would not be beaten by the most powerful enemy under the political oppression; hopelessness, defeatism, and silence. She also hopes to find a way to make the new possibility, witnessed on the street, come true. (CHO Hye-young)

Director

Hana MAKHMALBAFHana MAKHMALBAF

Born in 1988, Tehran. At the age of 7 she acted in her father Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s A Moment of Innocence. Her first short, The Day My Aunt Was Ill, received international attention at the Locarno Film Festival in 1997, when the director was only 9 years old. At the age of 14, she made Joy of Madness, a behind-the-scenes documentary about her sister Samira’s feature At Five in The Afternoon. It premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2003 and received 3 international awards. At the age of 18, Hana made her first feature, Buddha Collapsed Out of Shame, in Bamian, Afghanistan. The film went on to receive great acclaim around the world, as well as many prestigious awards.